Baby Is Three (18 page)

“Empathy,” defined the intellectual: “The ability to see through another’s eyes, to feel with his finger-tips.

“To know fire as the feathers of a Phoenix know it. To know, as a bedded stone, the coolth of brook-water …”

Phup!

“Reload,” said the intellectual

In its time the second projectile followed, and then a third and a fourth.

“
This is the machine,” old Torth said to the youngster. “It was monopolized, long ago, by a caustic old triad who has since died. And may I join him soon, for it troubles me to be so old.”

“And what was the machine for?”

“One Eudiche was analyzed into his three components and sent to that star there
.

“It’s a planet.”

“Youth knows too much, too young,” grumbled Torth
.

“And why was Eudiche sent?”

“To test the sending; to synthesize himself there; and to prepare for mass emigration of our kind to the planet.”

“He failed?”

“He failed. He took over three inhabitants successfully enough, but that was all. He had empathy, you know.”

The youngster shuddered. “No loss.”

“No loss,” repeated Torth. “And then the reason for invasion was removed, and no one bothered to use the machine again, and no one will.”

“That was when the molds came?”

“Yes, the molds. Just as we came out of space so long ago, as crystalline spores, so these molds arrived on Titan. At that time, you
know, we possessed all Titans and reproduced faster than they did. We had to expand.”

“It is not so now,” said the youngster with confidence
.

“No,” said Torth. “Happily, no. The products of the molds—and the molds grow profusely here—worked miracles with the metabolism of our hosts. They reproduce faster and they live longer.”

“And will they never overpopulate Titan?”

“Not in our time, not in any predictable time. Titan can support billions of the little creatures, and there are only a few thousand today. The rate of increase is not that great. Just great enough to give us, who are parasites, sufficient hosts.”

“And—what happened to Eudiche?”

“He died,” said Vaughn. Her voice was shocked, distraught in the cold dawn.

“He had to die,” said Dran sorrowfully. “His synthesis was complete in us three. His consistency was as complete. His recognition of the right to live gave him no alternative. He saved his own race on its own terms, and saved—spared, rather—spared us on human terms. He found what we were, and he loved it. Had he stayed here, he and his progeny and his kind would have destroyed the thing he loved. So he died.”

The grey light warmed as they started down the hill, and then the dawn came crashing up in one great crescendo of color, obliterating its pink prelude and establishing the theme for the sun’s gaudy entrance. Drunk with its light, three people crossed the frozen brook and came to the edge of the road.

At last Manuel spoke. “What have we got here?”

Dran looked at the satchels, at Vaughn, at Manuel. “What have you got?”

Manuel kicked his foot locker. “I’ve got the beginnings of a space drive. You’ve got a whole new direction in biological chemistry. Runt—Oh my god, will you look at that face. I know—poems.”

“Poems,” she whispered, and smiled. The dawn had not been like that smile.

The taxi came. They loaded their cases in and sat very close together in the back.

“No one of us will ever be greater than any other,” Dran said after a time. “We three have a life, not lives. I don’t know anything yet about the details of our living, except that they will violate nothing.”

Vaughn looked into Manuel’s face, and into Dran’s. Then she chuckled, “Which means I’ll probably marry Joe.”

They were very close. Dran again broke the silence. “My next book will be my best. It will have this dedication:

“What Vaughn inspires, I design, and Manuel builds
.”

And so it came about.

Poor Joe.

A
S WE APPROACH
the year 2300, the most popular parlor game seems to be picking the Man of the Century. Some favor Bael benGerson because he rewrote the World Constitution, and some hark back to Ikihara and his work on radiation sickness. More often than not, you’ll hear Captain Riley Riggs nominated, and that comes pretty close to the mark.

But it misses—it misses. I’m just an old space-hound, but I know what I’m talking about. I was communications officer with Riggs, remember, and even if it was all of sixty years ago I remember it as if it was last month. The Third Venus Expedition, it was, and the trip that changed the face of the Earth. That was the space voyage that brought back the Venus crystals, and made you and you into the soft and happy butterflies you are today. Things were different in the old days. We knew what it was to put in a solid five-hour workday, and we had no personal robots the way everyone has now—we had to put our clothes on by ourselves in the morning. Well, it was a tougher breed then, I guess.

Anyway, my bid for the Man of the Century was on that ship, the old
Starlure—
but it wasn’t Riggs.

They were a grand crew. You couldn’t want a better skipper than Riggs nor a better mate than Blackie Farrel. There was Zipperlein, the engineer, a big quiet man with little eyes, and his tube techs, Greaves and Purci—a wilder pair of fire-eaters never hit black space. And there was Lorna Bernhard, the best navigator before or since. She was my girl, too, and she was gorgeous. There were two other women aboard—a ray analyst by the name of Betty Ordway and Honey Lundquist, the damage control officer. But they were strictly from blueprints and homely to boot.

And for comic relief we had this character Slopes. He was shipped because of some special training in the Venus crystals. I don’t know why they bothered to put him aboard. Any development work on the crystals would have to be done on Earth when—
if—
we got back. I guess they figured there was room for him, and maybe he’d be needed to locate the crystals or something. Meanwhile, he was useless. We all thought he was and we told him about it often enough to keep him reminded.

Not that he was a nuisance to anybody. It was just that he was funny. A natural comic. I don’t mean the kind who slips an anti-gravity plaque under the tablecloth and switches it on when somebody sets down the soup, and I don’t mean the life-of-the-party who sticks a brace of fluorescent tubes under his collar and pretends he’s a Martian. This Slopes was just automatically funny to have around. He wasn’t quite big enough, see, and though he wasn’t homely, he also wasn’t good-looking enough to do himself any good. His voice wasn’t quite deep enough or loud enough to be completely heard.… I guess the best way to say it is to call him an Almost; a thoroughgoing Almost. And the difference between Almost and Altogether—at least in Slopes—was very funny to ship out with, and he had it in every department.

None of us knew him before he came aboard, which he did two hours before blast-off in civilian clothes. That was his first mistake, though why I should call it a mistake … after all, he was a civilian technician. Even so, all the rest of us were from one or another of the Services, and we just naturally had something on him from the start. Purci, the Number Two Tube Man, was lounging in the alleyway when Slopes stepped off the cargo-lift with his gear, and he sized the man up right now. Purci was tall, loose-jointed, relaxed, deadpan. He took Slopes aft (down, that is, since the
Starlure
stood upright on her tail-vanes when she was aground) and showed him where to stow his gear. The locker Purci gave him happened to be the garbage port, which scavenged out automatically when we hit the ionosphere. There was no real harm in that—there was plenty of gear in the slop-chest which almost fit him, and at least he looked halfway “regulation.” But he sure was funny. The look on his face
when he went to that garbage port six hours out was indescribable. I have to laugh now thinking about it. And for the rest of the trip all he had to do was ask where anything was, and someone’d say, “Look in the garbage!” and the whole crew would lay back and roar.

Probably the most fun we had was at “turnover,” when we stopped accelerating and went into free fall. For Slopes’s benefit the artificial gravity was left off, and all hands but Zipperlein, who was at the drive controls, gathered in the wardroom to watch. Word had passed to everyone but Slopes as to just when the gravity would cut out, and believe me, it was a tough job to keep from busting out laughing and spoiling the whole deal. We all sprawled around hard by a stanchion or a bolted-down table so we’d have something solid to grab when the time came. Slopes came in and sat by himself near the chow-chutes, innocent as a babe. Greaves sat with one hand cupping his wrist watch and his eyes on the sweep second hand. About three seconds short of turnover, he barked, “Slopes! Come over here, huh?”

Slopes blinked at him. “Me?” He uncrossed his legs and got to his feet, timidly. He had taken about two steps when the drive cut off.

I guess nobody ever gets really used to turnover. Your stomach gives a delicate little heave and the semicircular canals in your inner ear rebel violently. You tense yourself, all over, to the cramping point, and get no end confused because, though you know you’re falling, you don’t know which way—and anyhow, your reflexes expect a swift and sudden impact (because you’re falling) and there just isn’t any impact, so your reflexes feel foolish. Your hair drifts out every which way, and through and through, completely separated from your intense panic, is the
damnedest
feeling of exhilaration and well-being. They call it Welsbach’s Euphoria. Psychological stuff. Anxiety relief with the gravityless state.

But I was talking about Slopes.

When Zipperlein cut the drive, Slopes just went adrift. His advancing foot touched and lightly scraped the floor instead of making a good solid pace. He flung his arms backward, I guess because he
thought he was falling that way, and as his shoulders checked the arm motion, they were carried down while his feet went up. He did a slow-motion half-somersault and would have gone all the way around if his feet hadn’t touched the overhead and stopped his rotation. He hung in midair with his head down and his feet up, with nothing to hang on to, and with the powerful feeling that, though the blood ought to be rushing to his face, it wasn’t. All of a sudden, everything around him acted like
up
, and there wasn’t any
down
left anywhere. He grabbed wildly toward the bulkhead, the overhead, the door—things he knew he couldn’t reach. After that he subsided, trembling, and by that time the rest of us had recovered from the weird impact of turnover—after all, we’d all felt it before—and we could enjoy the fun.

“I said, ‘Come here’!” Greaves snapped.

Slopes sort of flailed at the air and jigged with his feet. It made no never mind—he just stayed where he was, head down and helpless. We roared. He flapped his lips a couple of times, and then said, real strained,
“Mmmph. Mmmph.”
I thought I’d die.

“Don’t be so standoffish,” said the Lundquist chick, the damage control officer. “Come on down and give us a kiss.”

Slopes whispered, “Please … please.”

Betty Ordway said, “Make him say ‘pretty please.’ ” We laughed.

“Reckon maybe he don’t like us,” I piped up. “Come on down and join the crowd, Slopesy.”

Somebody said, “Hold out some garbage,” and everybody laughed again.

Zipperlein came in, hand over hand. “Looky there,” he said in his big, fat, flatulent voice. “Man can fly.”

“Got his head in the clouds,” said the skipper. Everybody laughed again—not because it was funny—because it was the skipper.

“Please,” said Slopes, “get me down. Somebody get me down.”

Greaves said, “I like a shipmate that can stand on his own two feet. Slopes, I asked you real polite-like to come on over and be sociable.”

Zipperlein laughed. “Oh—you want him?” He went from the door to the scuttlebutt, from the wardroom table to a lighting fixture,
one hairy hand after another, until he could reach Slopes’s foot. “Greaves wants you,” he said, and shoved.

Slopes spun end over end. He began to wail, “Ow-
oo!
Ow-
oo!”
as he turned. Spinning, he went from one end of the wardroom to the other toward Greaves. Greaves was ready for him, his hands firm to a banister-bar, his feet doubled up. When Slopes reached him, he planted his feet in Slopes’s back and booted him, spinning no longer, upship toward the Captain. Riggs gave him a shoulder and shunted him over to me. I butted him back to Greaves. Greaves reached but missed him, and he hit the bulkhead with a crunch. Weight is one thing—you can get rid of that. Mass is something else again. Slopes’s hundred and fifty-odd pounds were all with him, at high velocity, when he hit the wall. He hovered near it, whimpering.

“Zip,” said the Captain, “Turn on the grav plates. This could go on all day.”

“Aye,” said the engineer, and swarmed out.

I’d been hanging on to Lorna, partly because I knew she’d have hold of something solid, and partly because I just liked to hang on to her. “Ace,” she said to me, “whose idea was this?”

“Guess.”

“Ace,” she told me, “you know what? You’re a skunk.”

“Ah, climb off,” I grinned. “You should see what they did to me when I was a cadet.”

She turned to look at me, and there was an expression I’d seen in her eyes only twice before. Both times she and I had been strangers. She said, “I guess you learn something new every day. Even about people you know pretty well.”

“Yep,” I said, “and it’s a blessing. You can look at the stars just so long on these trips, and then you can watch just so many visitape recordings. After that you need something to relieve the monotony. I think we all owe Slopes a rousing vote of thanks. He’s a very funny man.”